Vanishing
by ohbanneryousexyhulk
Summary: A Hulkeye AU based off of the book As Simple As Snow by Gregory Galloway Clint Barton moved into town and meets Bruce Banner, the two become friends and eventually fall for each other, as they get closer Bruce begins to realize that Clint is very different then other people that live in the town. The week before Valentines day Clint disappears.
1. good-bye to everyone

Clint Barton had moved to the town back in August, just before his sophomore year in high school, but by February he had, one by one, killed everyone in town. He didn't do it all by himself – Bruce helped with a few, including his best friend Tony– but still, it was no small accomplishment, even if it was a small town.

He captured all of these lives and deaths in fourteen black-jacketed composition notebooks. By the time he had finished, there were more than 1,500 obituaries, on just under 2,800 handwritten pages. The lives he had written about were real, all true, but the deaths were fictions he invented, an average of around eight a day. "I'm not predicting the future." He said, "But it's only a matter of time before everyone catches up to me."

He had known things about people, or had discovered them – the secrets and private information that showed up in his notebooks were things that people who had spent their entire lives in the town didn't know. The funny thing is, during the months when the bodies were piling up in the imagination of Clint Barton, There wasn't a single person who actually died in the town; it was the longest drought for the funeral home that anyone could remember.

The obituaries were private; his friends and a few other people knew that Clint was working on them, but besides Bruce, No one else was allowed to read them. He started the project on his very first day in the town, the day Bruce saw him sitting on the front of his lawn of his new home, writing in one of his notebooks as the rest stood by his parents, watching their belongings parade from the long yellow truck into the house. And after he had written the last page seven months later, he was gone.

Maybe.

He left behind a little more than suggestions, hints, and suspicions. But there were enough of them to make you go crazy trying to figure out what it all meant. But you have to try

Bruce has to change some things – some names, some events – and then there are the things that happened that Bruce didn't see, didn't experience, and that he'll never know. There's stuff he's tried to place together and stuff he's tried to leave alone – he had to rely mostly on what he remembered and what he could find.

There are a few newspaper accounts of some of the events, some TV coverage, and there's the police report (which Bruce wasn't allowed to see), but none of those is really helpful. They all focus on the superficial details, and miss the real story of what happened. They've got their own version of the world to sell. Besides, they only tell what they've been told anyway, and very few of them talked to the person who knew the most about it – Bruce.

This is what Bruce knew that happened, or thought happened. He fell in love with a boy, and then he left, and later he tried to come back, or Bruce thought he did, and Bruce went after him. It should have been simple but in the end it could not have been more complicated, and maybe that was the whole point to begin with, but if love is true and still leaves you lonely, what good does it do? Bruce started to go over everything again, thinking. Bruce might find a way to him, wherever he was, or at least figure out what to do with all the things he left behind.

"You have your whole life ahead of you," his mother told him, "don't spend all your time in the past." Its good advice, Bruce knew it was, but the past has its own ideas. It can follow you around with a life of its own, casting a long shadow.


	2. Spooky Boyfriend

He was born in a thunderstorm. Bruce didn't know if that was true, but somebody once wrote about him and it seems to fit. She swirled into and out of Bruce's life, quickly changing everything, a dark question mark disappearing into a darker thing, a dark question mark disappearing into a darker hole. His name was Clint Barton. "It's supposed to be 'Bartan,'" he told Bruce in the second conversation Bruce had with him, "and there are a couple of theories of how it got to be spelled with an o. One is that some of the family was involved in some sort of criminal activity a long time ago, hundreds of years – murder, kidnapping, that sort of thing - and that the more respectable relatives changed the spelling of their name to distance themselves from the bad ones. Another version has it that it was the criminals who changed their name to Barton, so it would be harder to find them once they left their old lives behind." Bruce told him that he heard the same thing about his family, since his last name was also available in an o and an a version.

"You'd think that if they really wanted to distance themselves from each other, they'd change more than just one letter," said Bruce.

"Well, it's a bit mysterious," he said, a little put off by the fact his story wasn't as unique as he thought. He and his foster parents had moved into the town, which in itself was an odd occurrence, since not too many people moved into the town; they almost all moved out. But there were the Barton's, watching the movers unload the truck and put their boxed belongings in the white two-story three-bedroom house on Twixt Road, just before it intersected with Town Street, which ran down by the river. The neighbors watched too, slowly pulled out of their houses and down the street, attracted to the yellow moving truck as if it were a huge magnet. They came by and introduced themselves and stood with the Barton's like spectators at a parade, a ball game, or some great historical event worthy of a rapt, attentive crowd.

Bruce and his friend Tony Stark rode their bikes over and stood with the large group that formed. They didn't really care about the truck or what came out of it; they didn't really care about the parents and what they looked like. They'd already heard that the Barton's had an only child, a boy their age. They wanted to see the boy. At least Bruce did.

They were disappointed; he was not what they had expected, and far from what they had hoped for. He came out of the house wearing a pair of headphones over his short bleach blonde hair, the cord snaked into the pocket of a short black jacket. It was the kind of jacket someone would pump gas in, worn on a hot, humid day when it was, complete certainty, the only jacket being worn in town. Under the jacket he had a black shirt, which, Bruce found out later, was long-sleeved. He never wore short sleeves. He was also wearing a pair of jeans and heavy boots – black. He had a black expression. He sat down in the grass and started writing in a black notebook. Bruce didn't give him much thought that day, but once Bruce got to know him Bruce often wondered whether he had been completely different the day before Tony & Bruce first saw him, whether he had dressed in normal clothes, with a more inviting appearance and expression. Except for two notable expressions, Bruce never witnessed any other incarnation; he was always in his Goth gear, black and blonde and brooding.

"It's a freak show," Tony said. "Let's go back to your house."

Bruce lived about a mile and a half north of the Barton's, in a house very similar to theirs. Bruce lived on Valley View Road, but you couldn't see a valley from it. Bruce actually lived at the bottom of a hill, where he saw only hills, in all directions.

It was a long walk to the Barton's, if you stayed on the streets, but you could save some time if you cut through Mrs. Grey's yard and then across the vacant lot where the McCoy house had burned down two years before. Then, when you got to Talus road, you cut through the Marie's. You could get there in about fifteen minutes. Bruce did it lots of times.

All of this would become important.

His given name was Clint, but he insisted on being called Clinton. Bruce and Clint had that in common. Bruce wanted everyone to use his full first name Robert. It wasn't out of vanity; Bruce was named after his mother's brother, who had died young – just thirteen – and Bruce had always been called by the full name because he had been. Bruce never liked his name that much, it never really seemed his, a sort of hand-me-down from someone who never got enough use out of it, but what can you do? Only famous people have had their names changed, or else somebody has to give you a nickname, and no one was going to do that for Bruce. Or you have to be someone like Clint, and just take the name yourself.

He was always spooky. His friends were worse. They strolled silently through the school in their funeral clothes and black lipstick and eyeliner and gun-black hair. There were seven Marilyn Manson types in school. ("One for every day of the week," Tony had said "as if one wasn't enough"), three of them were in Tony and Bruce's sophomore class. There were two seniors and two juniors and no freshmen. Tony and Bruce hoped they were a species headed for extinction.

They stuck out like badly bruised thumbs and Tony and Bruce thought they were pretentious and full of shit. They were rarely alone, a traveling convention of mourners, except for him. Bruce would see him sitting by himself in class, eating alone in the cafeteria, or just standing on his own in the hallway between classes. It's what Bruce disliked most about him at first, Bruce thought he was even more pretentious and bolder than his friends, and then it became one of the things Bruce liked most about him. Sometimes it works out that way, Bruce guessed, and sometimes the other way.

Their school, good old Summers High, was three stories tall, a long rectangle situated east-west on top of a low hill, with an entrance on each of the shorter sides. There is some debate about whom the school was named after. Almost everyone assumed it was after the adulterous Scott Summers (as Clint liked to call him), who was shot dead by Logan Howlett in a duel on the banks of the Hudson River, for spreading lies and rumors about Howlett. There had been Summers' around town years ago, but no one had ever found anything they had done to be noteworthy or exceptional enough to name a building after any of them, but there were people who still believed the school was named after some of these other Summers'. Bruce's mother was one of those people; she contended that the town would never name a building, especially a school, after such an immoral man. "He's on the ten-dollar bill, Mom," Bruce said.

"What the federal government decides is suitable has nothing to do with us," she said. It was the most political statement Bruce ever heard his mother ever make.

Everybody stood around in the hallways before class, and every group had its own spot. The bandoids were always in the basement, the arty types hung around Mrs. Romanoff's classroom, the jocks were on the first floor by the west entrance, down the hall from the 4-H'ers, the geeks hung out at the eastern end of the second floor, the speech and debate team was on the western end ("I don't do a lot of business on the second floor," Tony always said). Tony traveled from floor to floor, and it never mattered where Bruce was. Clint and the rest of the ghouls were always on the third floor, a dark cloud hanging there. Sometimes walking to school Bruce would look up and see them, crow-black and still, perched high in the morning sky. And after school they walked together into the nearby woods. They were said to do all sorts of things there: They took drugs and had sex and performed rituals involving animal sacrifices. They cast spells there, placing curses on people in town, and plotted whom to torment and inflict pain and suffering on. Some people in the school avoided the woods, but Bruce never had a problem. Tony and Bruce had come across trees with strange markings cut into them, and a circle of upside down crosses, but they never knew whether these things had been left by the Goths themselves or by somebody else trying to add to their reputation. It all seemed so silly – but what was more idiotic, a group of high schoolers standing around chanting a bunch of mumbo jumbo, or the rest of the school thinking this type of stuff actually happened, and that it might really work?

There were tons of rumors about them. They were burnouts and vegans. They had pierced their bodies in strange places and had tattoos of runes and symbols and foreign languages all over. They were Satan worshippers, witches. They performed strange occult rituals involving decapitating animals and drinking blood. There were rumors that the guys in the group had taken the girls as their wives, and they all shared them with one another. They engaged in bondage and torture and self-mutilation. They had sex with corpses. They were all gay. If you believed everything, they were tattooed Satan-worshipping Goth Mormon homosexual S&M piercing necrophiliac drug-using vegetarians. It was a small school, and they must have known what was being said about them all the time behind their black backs, but they never responded. They were mysterious and odd and no one liked them.

Bruce would have gone ignoring Clint Barton forever, except for the fact that he spoke to him first. If Bruce had known that he was coming his way, Bruce would have done everything in his power to avoid him. He wasn't the person you wanted to be seen with. He wasn't someone you thought would talk to you first either. He sneaked up on Bruce. It was the end of September and Bruce was in the library stacks, wasting the rest of his lunch hour, trying out a new theory, a suggestion on of his teachers had given him. Bruce had taken On the road by Ben Grimm from the shelf and turned around, and there he was, standing quietly a few feet away, calmly staring at Bruce.

"Lucas is better," he said.

"I don't know about that." Bruce looked at the book in his hand and then looked past him. It should have indicated to him that Bruce wanted to get by to check out the Grimm. He didn't pay any attention. He stood his ground and gave Bruce a slight smile. He had more to tell him.

"He shot his wife you know."

"I know," Bruce said. Bruce didn't know. Bruce didn't even know whether he was talking about Lucas or Grimm. Bruce was just hoping that he would stop talking and let him get away from him as quickly as possible.

"They were playing William Tell. They were drinking at a friend's apartment, and Lucas pulls out a gun and turns to his wife and says, 'It's time for the old William Tell act,' and she puts a glass on her head and then he shoots her."

"Really?" Bruce said. Then he told Bruce the whole story about Carl Lucas and how he was the grandson of the inventor of the adding machine and how he was friends with Grimm and is in On the road as "Old Bull Lee" and his with is "Greer" and how even killing his wife didn't do anything to curb his fascination with guns and that he used to make paintings with cans of paint and a shotgun. The words streamed out of him; he could have been making it all up, for all Bruce knew, but Bruce actually wanted to hear more.

"Did he go to prison?"

"It happened in Mexico," he said, as if that was all the explanation Bruce needed.

There was an awkward pause; Bruce wanted him to continue, but he finished. Bruce panicked and said, "I suppose you're looking for Stephen King," and moved to let him go around him and deeper into the stacks. He looked at Bruce as if he was an idiot. Bruce could feel an embarrassed blush fill his face and Bruce was afraid that he might turn and leave. A couple of minutes before, Bruce had wanted desperately to get away from him, and now Bruce was hoping that he would stay and pay more attention to him.

He stayed. "He's only written two books worth reading," he said.

There wasn't a pause, but a full stop, and Bruce stood waiting for him to speak. If Bruce hadn't asked him to name the books, he never would have divulged his opinion. He had an intriguing way of speaking. His sentences were icebergs, with just the tip of his tongue coming out of his mouth, and the rest kept up in his head, which Bruce was starting to think was more and more beautiful the longer he looked ay him.

"Carrie and The Shining," he finally said.

"I've read the shining," Bruce said, happy to have something in common.

"One to go," he said. "And then you can be done with Mr. King."

He was looking for Ororo Munroe, whom Bruce has never heard of. She wrote horror stories, he said, in the early 1900s. He read anything, but he especially liked books (fiction and nonfiction) about the supernatural. He continued to move through the stacks, and Bruce followed him. He was done talking, So Bruce watched him scan the rows of books, selecting authors and titles Bruce had never heard of, like Samuel Wilson, Reed Richards, and All the little live things, until he had armful. Bruce went to the frount desk and checked out both the King and The Grimm while he simply walked out with his and waited for Bruce at the door. "I'll return them when I'm finished," he said. Bruce had the feeling that he did that sort of thing all the time. The rules didn't apply. Bruce had to get to class, but Bruce wanted to keep following him, Bruce wanted to talk to him to talk to him more. By the time Bruce had thought of saying something else to him he was disappearing down the hall.


	3. i don't want to bore you, but

This is what you should know about Bruce Banner: He's bland. He's Milk. Worse, He's water. Worse yet, He's a water glass – at least water can change shape or become some other form, like ice or vapor. Instead, He's bland and rigid and everyone can look right through him and see there's nothing. He's got nothing. He's walking wallpaper. Bruce almost wishes he had a broken nose, or a cauliflower ear, or a scar across his face, something that you could remember. If there was something on the outside to grab some other boys, or girl's attention, they might see that Bruce was a good person, a quality person. Most people just look once and don't see him, and move on.

When Bruce was a freshman at school he tried imitating the cool guys in class. Bruce went out and bought the same clothes that they wore and tried to wear them the way they did, but Bruce ended up looking like an idiot. Something was missing. The clothes were cool, but Bruce wasn't. There was nothing to be done; Bruce was stuck with who he was. Everyone seemed to have something on him. The geeks had their own look, same with the Goths, the Jocks. They all had some way that connected them with someone else. Even the retarded kids had better style than Bruce did.

"Wear what makes you feel comfortable," Tony told him. "If you're comfortable, people will be comfortable around you." It was easy for him; Tony knew what he was doing. But Bruce took his advice and started wearing jeans or khakis and a plain shirt and sweater. Clint called it the "harmboy" look, somewhere between hip and farmboy, he said. Bruce liked Abercrombie & Fitch clothes, but he hated the fact that their name was on everything. They put it on the pockets and sleeves and tails of their shirts and pants. Bruce didn't want to go around advertising some company, so Bruce took off the labels on the shirts and pants and sweaters his mother bought for him. Most of them came off all right, he just took a small pair of scissors and cut the thread in the back, and the thing unraveled and the label pulled right off (if his mom bought him anything with the name printed on it, Bruce would either wear it underneath something or not wear it at all), but removing some labels left holes in the sleeves or at the bottom of the shirt. That was Bruce's only defining characteristic: a few holes here and there. Bruce wore some Carhartts once in a while, which no one else wore except for the shit-kicking farm kids. "Bussers," is what Tony and Bruce called them. Wade Wilson had been a bus rider, and he was also a Goth. He was the only Goth on the bus, which might explain why he was such an as. He had a chip on his shoulder about something, although he shouldn't have. He wasn't really a farm kid, though; he lived near Hydesville, about fifteen minutes away. That was the only other town where they rode the bus to Bruce's school. The rest of them were farm kids. Wade was a senior, which meant that he no longer rode the bus. He drove.

Wade Wilson had started as a jock. He played football and ran cross-country, and was one of the best basketball players in the school. He started on the varsity team when he was a freshman (that was the only team the school had; they didn't have enough players for another squad), and helped lead them to the second round of the state championship. The funny thing about that was that the old court in the high school, built in the 1940s, no longer met the minimum state requirements and so the team had to play every game of the season on the road. A new gymnasium was built at the end of the season. It was a big ugly metal building plopped down between the school and the football field. It had a cramped, dingy weight room, and a small balcony that was never used for anything. But it had a great basketball court, and bleachers that folded up into walls so you could fit almost the whole town in the metal box for meetings and dances and whatever else people could think of, but they never thought of anything, so the place was always empty, except for games. Everyone was looking forward to the next season. Everyone was looking forward to seeing Wade, a year older, a year better. He was a strong tall brunette athlete who had secured himself in the schools elite and had everyone's admiration.

When football practice started at the end of the summer, Wade didn't show up, and when school started he had a shaved head and was dressed all in black. He wasn't the first, but he was the one they cared about.

Wade Wilson was a world away from Bruce – he lived in another town, he drove, he was a Goth, and he was a senior. Bruce wished they never had anything to do with each other, and Bruce wished he wasn't in this story at all.


	4. locker

To be honest, Bruce wasn't much of a reader before he met Clint. Bruce was in the library only to see if he could meet someone. This was advice that was given to him by his coach and art teacher, Mr. Lebeau. "It's a good way to meet girls," he told Bruce as he handed in his helmet and uniform pads. "It gives you something to talk about with them, you know, breaks the ice a little. You have to think about it, though. Don't just grab the first book you see, or the books everybody else is reading. You want to stand out from the crowd." Bruce never told his coach that he preferred boys over girls, but he figured the advice could work vise versa. Mr. Lebeau always seemed to be hanging out with some girl in the hallway between classes, or after school, so Bruce figured he knew what he was talking about. Besides, Bruce didn't really have anything to lose. Bruce thought about where to go in the library and what books to try out. Bruce didn't want to get stuck with any nonfiction – that seemed like too much work – and Bruce wasn't going near poetry or any of that romantic stuff. That left fiction (or encyclopedias and other reference books, If Bruce wanted to attract a very particular, peculiar boy, the kind you didn't need a book to attract in the first place). Bruce finally decided to go after books that he would actually want to read and would attract a certain type of boy, somebody interesting and smart, or who at least thought Bruce was smart. Bruce ended up picking Ben Grimm because he knew who he was and he guessed because he was kind of like someone he hoped to be. He was a cool guy for a while in the 1950s, a James Dean type, and maybe Bruce thought that some of that would rub off on him if others saw him with his book. If Bruce could be more like Ben Grimm, then maybe he wouldn't need to hang out in the library to meet other people. For him, it worked the first time out. Bruce guessed Mr. Lebeau didn't think football was going to do the trick for him.

Bruce was too light, for one thing, but Bruce was fast and had good hands, so he put Bruce in at wide receiver. Bruce didn't start or anything like that, but Bruce saw some action and wasn't entirely horrible. They lost every game anyway, so you had to be completely worthless not to play. Bruce had maybe a dozen or so passes thrown to him, even caught one for a touchdown, but it was called back on a penalty. Then in practice after the fifth game of the season Bruce broke the index finger on his left hand. Even his injury lacked any sort of glamour or interest. Bruce had caught a pass in the flat, maybe ten yards from the line of scrimmage, and was tackled by three or four guys, and somebody stepped on his hand as they were getting up from the pile and Bruce's finger snapped like a twig. It didn't hurt, but it swelled up immediately and turned blue and purple. The assistant coach, Mr. Rasputin walked Bruce back to the locker room like he had a broken skull or something. He even offered to call Bruce's parents for him. Bruce told him that he used the phone with his right hand, which got a laugh out of him at least.

Bruce's Mom picked him up and drove him to the hospital. They took X-Rays and a day or two later told them what they already knew. The season was going to be over before the broken finger could heal, and Bruce's parents wanted him to quit, and Bruce didn't try to talk them out of it, and that was that. It might have been different if Bruce had been a starter. Bruce imagined himself pulling down a game-winning pass with one good hand and the other heavily taped. Of course that didn't happen. "Put some weight on and study the playbook and we'll see about next season," Mr. Devon told Bruce after he had cleared out his locker.

The morning after he had talked to Bruce in the library, Clint was waiting by Bruce's locker. At least Bruce likes to think that he was waiting there – he might have just been standing near it with some of his friends. They were grouped together as they always were, only this time in a different spot. Bruce saw him as he started to open the lock, and gave him a quick nod when he saw him. He left his friends and came over.

"Did you finish Grimm yet?" he said.

Bruce laughed. "No."

"You'd better get a move on, we've got a lot to accomplish."

"Like what?"

"You'll see," he said. "Maybe."

Bruce opened his locker and found a note he had left for him. "Dear HP – There's a whole world all-around more interesting, wonderful, terrifying, mysterious, amazing than any novel ever written. Pay attention. Take a chance. Dare life. Love, Munroe."

Over the following months, he would always call Bruce different names in his notes and letters, and never sign them with his own name. Sometimes the references were obvious, and sometimes Bruce didn't know what the hell he was trying to tell him. This one seemed obvious. He had been looking for Ororo Munroe in the library, but then Bruce started thinking about it, perhaps too much, and thought of a bunch of other things that it could mean, he didn't like some of them too much, maybe he was making of him, or trying to humiliate Bruce. That moment made all the difference; two paths were clearly marked: Turn his back on Clint's difficult attention and continue on with his life, or respond to him, follow him, and watch the world Bruce thought he knew reveal things he had never imagined. Of course, at the time Bruce was unaware of any of this. Bruce just followed whatever instinct he had. Bruce wasn't sure if he liked Clint. Although he thought Clint was beautiful and sexy and all that, he was scary, mysterious. Bruce knew there could be trouble. Bruce thought he knew even then.

Bruce threw the note away, but by the time he reached home he regretted it.


	5. October 1st

He had left a postcard in Bruce's locker. The font was a photograph of some old Mexican guy, who, Bruce discovered was Pancho Villa. On the back was written: "Lora – Good-bye – if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico – ah, that is euthanasia! A. Bierce." This was Goth flirting, this was Clint Barton. This one was a keeper. Bruce taped it to his bedroom wall; it was the first of many to go there. Each one was a little puzzle, and now Bruce knew that each was a piece of a larger puzzle too. It was a game, and Bruce spent most of that night trying to think of some clever comeback, but had Bruce at a disadvantage. He was smarter. Bruce spent the rest of the night thinking about him.


	6. October 4th

Bruce had wanted to ask him out after they talked in the library, but it didn't seem to make any sense. What would the rest of the school think? Bruce would be linked with the Goths and further alienated from everyone. Of course Bruce was alienated already. On Friday Bruce saw him in the hall before class and went up to him.

"I finished," Bruce said.

"Finished what?"

"Both books. Both. Grimm and King."

"Good for you," he said. He was cold and distant, quickly walking away from Bruce. Bruce had to follow him.

"I was thinking that maybe you could help me pick out something else."

"Sorry," he said. "You're on your own." He stopped and looked straight at Bruce. His eyes seemed to be looking at something behind Bruce, gazing straight through him and then off into the distance. "I've got to go to class."

That was almost the end of it. But Bruce was getting his coat from his locker at the end of the day when he came up to Bruce. He was in a hurry. "Here," he said. He handed Bruce two slim paperbacks: The way for the gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Jonathan Storm and The Street of crocodiles by Stephen Strange. "Read these," he said.

"More dead guys?" Bruce said.

"No one can disappoint you when they're dead."

Bruce took the books and started to walk away.

"Where are you going?"

"I don't know. Home, I guess."

"I'll walk with you." They left the school and Clint said he wanted to walk down by the river. "Are you in a hurry to get home?"

"Never," Bruce said.

The Furniss River was about a half-mile east of the school. It cut through town and ran south, bending around until it flowed eastward for about a mile before it snaked south again. It was a small river, no more than a quarter of a mile across, but it was deep and had a strong current, especially in the spring and fall. Two bridges crossed the river, one at the south end of town and one that ran into Main Street just north of the middle of town. Main Street, which defined the business district, was only five blocks long and consisted of two restaurants (The Oaks and Burke's), three bars, a post office, a public library, a liquor store, two pottery stores, a used-book store and a video store, a bait-and-tackle store, a canoe and kayak rental shop, a small grocery that was almost worthless (you were better off going to Blaze's gas station at the south end of town – at least they never ran out of milk and other staples), and an art gallery where local artists sold their stuff.

A dirt hiking path followed the river along the western side from one edge of town to the other, and the two walked south along that. They could see a few fishermen packing up their gear before it turned dark.

"Do you ever walk down here at night?" he said.

"No."

"You should. It's quiet, with just the sound of the river and the wind. It's calming. Sometimes I come down here when I can't sleep, and I just sit and listen. I've fallen asleep on the banks before, and then had to hurry home in the morning before my parents found out. You should come here sometime late at night."

"I'd probably fall in," Bruce said.

"Can I ask you something? Something kind of personal?"

"It depends," Bruce said.

"When you came up to me earlier today, were you going to ask me out?"

"What?"

"Were you going to ask me to the game tonight?"

Bruce couldn't even get a response out, just an open-mouthed, slack-jawed silence.

"Never mind," he said. "Let me try this again. Would you go to the game with me?"

"Why?"

"Well that's for you to figure out," he said. "But let me tell you something. I thought you were going to ask me out earlier, and that's why I acted like an ass. I'm sorry. I wasn't ready, and then when I realized what you were doing, it freaked me out. I'm not used to people paying attention to me, I mean like that, so I had to figure it out first. I had to buy some time."

"And?"

"And I would be very happy if you would ask me to the game tonight."

"Would you go to the game with me, tonight?" Bruce said.

"Yes," he said, and then leaned over and gave Bruce a very quick kiss on the mouth.

Bruce went home and ate his dinner in as few bites as humanly possible and then walked over to Clint's. Clint's Dad drove them to the game. Mr. Barton looked nothing like his son. While Clint had a round face with a small nose, his Dad was almost gaunt, with a sharp, prominent nose. His hair was crazy and frizzy and went everywhere before it finally collapsed below his shoulders. He looked slightly deranged or dangerous. In fact, he looked like the male version of the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. Bruce half expected monkeys to fly into the car and grab him and take him to some cage somewhere.

They were sitting in the bleachers, near the top, in the second-to-last row, where Clint always sat. None of his friends arrived yet. It was just the two of them. Bruce was nervous. By Monday everyone in school would know. Bruce felt that everyone was staring at them, but that was impossible. They were all looking at the field. No one cared, but Bruce still felt awkward, sitting with his stupid blue and gold school jacket, and Clint was dressed all in black. Bruce's parents had bought him the jacket when he made the football team. "You need it so you can wear your letter," his mother said. Only now Bruce wasn't going to get a letter. Bruce just had the jacket. Bruce wished he could sit down at the bench, at least there the jacket would make sense, and people would see him with the splint on his finger. Bruce was nervous. All of a sudden, he didn't know what to say.

"You haven't said anything about my finger." Bruce kind of held up the splint toward him.

"What did you want me to say, 'Way to go dumbass'?"

"Most people say something." Bruce said.

"Most people say the obvious."

He had teased Bruce from the first time he spoke to him, and Bruce liked it. A bright glint would appear in Clint's eyes, a sense of enjoyment and a clue not to take her seriously. His mouth took a hint of a smile, and his voice was not as deadpan as he probably would have wanted. It was a game, flirtatious and fleeting, a way to pass the time and test each other's agility.

"I didn't know if you knew about it."

"Don't flatter yourself, but I did know about it."

"Believe me, I'm not flattered," Bruce said. Bruce asked him if he had been to any of the games before.

"All of them," he said. Bruce already knew the answer. Tony and Bruce used to talk about them on the bench; the vampires huddled together at the top of the stands. They never cheered; they just sat and watched like menacing birds on a wire.

"Why?"

The glint evaporated and his eyes turned dark and hard.

"What you don't about what you don't know about."

He shook his head. Bruce had been scolded. Then he started to laugh.

"Have you seen the movie Strangers on a Train?"

"No."

"There's this scene where the character Danny is at a Tennis match and everyone is watching the ball go back and forth across the net, their heads are moving right to left, right to left, but Danny's head is perfectly still, because he's staring at one of the players. You can see the entire stadium watching the ball, and there's Danny, the only one perfectly still, staring."

"Why's he the only one?"

"You'll have to watch it to find out," he said. "Come on; let's go make some Danny's." He jumped up and grabbed Bruce by the hand, and they walked down the steps to sit in the front row. Now everyone was watching.

"What's it feel like to be the center of attention?" he said.

"Let's go back up where we were."

"Relax. Enjoy the game."

Bruce looked back up into the stands. No one seemed to be staring, until you got to the place where they had been sitting. All of Clint's friends were there, looking right at me.

"They don't look happy."

Clint laughed again. "Do they ever? Forget it. Pay some attention to me for a change. It's a date, remember?"

At halftime Bruce went to get the two of them something to drink at the concession stand behind the bleachers. "You'll be here when I get back?"

"I won't make any promises."

Bruce waited in line and wondered how many people had noticed Clint and him together. No one said anything to Bruce and no one appeared to be paying any more attention to him at all. It was a little disappointing. Bruce bought a large box of popcorn and a couple of large cups of soda. It was hard to carry everything with the splint on his finger, and Bruce was sure that something was going to spill before he could make it back to his seat.

When he got to the walkway above his section, he noticed that Wade Wilson was sitting next to Clint, in his spot. Bruce wanted to wait and watch them. Bruce couldn't see his face, but Clint was looking at him with concentration and affection; it was an intimate look that made Bruce suddenly jealous. Bruce also became aware that the rest of the Goths were watching him as he stood in the walkway, so he moved down the steps toward his seat.

Wade stood up and passed Bruce on the steps without saying a word to him, but Bruce could hear a few of the parents in the stands speak to him. "We could use you out there, son." "It's a shame you're not playing." Things like that.

Clint took a cup of soda from Bruce and Bruce sat down. "Wade wants us to go sit with them," he said. "but I told him to get his own date."


	7. notes

Bruce wasn't popular, but he didn't think he was unpopular. Bruce didn't think anyone even paid attention to him. Bruce was never in anyone's thoughts or opinions, at least that's what he had believed. Clint changed all of that. They became something of a scandal, the talk of the whole school.

They both got notes in their lockers on the same day, the Tuesday after the football game. It was the same message for both of them: Stay away from each other. "What are you thinking?" that's how Bruce's note started. It was handwritten on lined notebook paper. It was sloppy, as if written by a child, or someone using the wrong hand. "Stay away from that faggot. You don't know what trouble you are in for. What do you know about him? He will fuck you up. Take it from someone who knows."

"This is for your own good. Stay away from that geek. You can't trust him. He's a liar. He will hurt you." That's what Clint's note said. It was typed on plain white paper.

Bruce had an idea who had written both of them, but he wanted to find out for sure.

"Don't worry about it," Clint said. "I get notes all the time. Just ignore it, and it will take care of itself."

He didn't wait for Bruce after school. Bruce was walking home when he saw him in the passenger seat of Wade's car.

At school the next morning all the talk was about Wade Wilson. He had been in a serious accident the night before, slamming his Intrigue into the side of the northern bridge and spun down the bank, and almost went into the river. Wade was taken to the hospital. Luckily he had only a broken leg. Bruce didn't particularly care about Wade before, but Bruce wouldn't have wished that on him, not then anyway.

Clint was having a hard time maintaining his usually calm, almost trembling when Bruce saw him.

"What was he doing?"

"I don't know," he said. "Somebody said he'd been drinking, but I don't know what he was doing over here. He hardly ever comes over here at night."

"He's going to be alright. That's what they say, that he's going to be all right."

"That's what they say."

Bruce noticed that a bruise was visible on Clint's left cheek. "What happened there?"

His hand sprang to hide the spot. "I got punched," he said.

"Who did that?"

"Never mind. I took care of it. I told you I would take care of it."

"You said it would take care of itself. Was it Wade?"

"Why would you say that?"

"I saw you with him after school yesterday."

"It wasn't Wade," he said. "He gave me a rider home after. He was helping me. You won't get any more of those notes."

"Who was it?"

"Don't worry about it."

"Do they have a bruise they're hiding this morning?"

"I didn't punch anyone," he said. "But they got the message. Don't worry, I can take care of myself." He gave Bruce a hug and quick kiss on the cheek and hurried off to class.


	8. the house of barton

It's funny how strangers can pass in front of you every day and all you see is a flat shadow, a vague outline, not noticing any of the details. They move in a gray crowd, always looking the same and acting the same, simple caricatures of who they really are, but once you get to know them, you notice specific, tiniest things, you pay attention to the intricacies of their personalities, their habits and particular ways of walking and talking, the subtle changes in their appearance and dress.

It was that way with Bruce and Clint. Bruce had thought once of him only as a generic figure, one of a set of identical ghouls, but now Bruce began to notice the smallest changes about him, the things that made him unique. Bruce used to think that he wore the same black shirt and the same black jacket every day. Bruce thought that he wore the same black boots, but he really had three different pairs of Doc Martens, the six-eyelet, eight-eyelet, and ten-eyelet versions ("What's wrong with fourteen?" Bruce had to ask him later). He also had a pair of the three-eyelet Gibson shoe, but you almost never saw him in shoes.

Bruce noticed his eyes were constantly changing. They could be clear, bright blue and suddenly darken and become almost gray. At times they would flicker with light, and Bruce would swear that he could see them changing, with white clouds passing across his pupils, and the next second they would look like ice. He would stare at Bruce or at some point far beyond him, or at nothing, with his eyes locked and still, not tick-tocking back and forth but dead calm, and the blues would darken and become as vacant and useless as empty swimming pools. Bruce began to take note of his mood and the color and texture of his eyes to see whether there was some sort of correlation, some sort of code that Bruce could use to better understand him. If there was a code, Bruce didn't have enough time to break it.

As time went by, Bruce began to notice things that were strange and unsettling. The first was harmless; they all might have been. He had a cut on the left side of his lower lip and when Bruce asked him about it he responded that he couldn't remember how he had gotten it. "Maybe I bit myself in my sleep," he said. A few days later Bruce noticed Bruises on the back of his neck, on both sides, as though someone had choked him. He couldn't remember how he had gotten those either. "Maybe from a necklace I was wearing," he said. He always shrugged them off and acted as if they weren't anything, like the bruise he had in the morning after Wade's accident. They matter more now, looking back.

There were some things Bruce did question him about, however, things he couldn't easily shrug off. He always wore long sleeves, no matter what the weather, and the first time Bruce saw his bare arms Bruce noticed a number of small cuts on his left forearm. There must have been twenty to thirty, some fading and healing, others scabbed over, and some fresh, still red and swollen. "I'm trying to quit smoking," he said. "I started cutting my arm every time I wanted a cigarette, to associate the pain with smoking." He looked down at his arm. "Unfortunately, I think it's worked the wrong way. I'm starting to associate the pleasure of smoking with cutting. Now instead of thinking that smoking will hurt me, I think that cutting will feel good, you know, like a cigarette should." He laughed. "I just have to be smarter than my own mind."

Bruce also discovered that he had a tattoo. At least Bruce thought he did. It wasn't always there. This was another game, perhaps. Whatever it was, the mark was on his hip. It was a wheel, and the spokes inside the wheel turned into sharp spikes as they came out of the wheel. There was writing on each of the spokes, but Bruce could never tell what they said. "I don't know what they are either," Clint said. Bruce didn't believe him.

"Why did you get the tattoo then?"

"It's a family thing. My parents have the same one. In the same place. It's a tradition." Bruce didn't believe that either. Not entirely.

"What does it mean?"

"It has something to do with the fact that we're all witches." He looked at Bruce, reading his face and eyes to see if he had believed him. He started laughing.

"Is any of that true?" Bruce said.

"My parents have the tattoo. I don't really know what it means. I think it's kind of cool, though, don't you?"

Bruce did.

The next time Bruce saw his bare hip, the tattoo was gone, and Bruce began to doubt everything he had told him about it. To be fair, Bruce only saw it a couple of times in good light, so maybe it was there all the time but Bruce didn't notice. You'd think you'd notice a thing like the impermanence of a tattoo, though. Maybe it was fake, and he kept removing it and applying it, hoping Bruce would say something. Bruce never said anything. Bruce just waited for that little spiked wheel with the strange writing to come and go.

A week or so after the football game, and after a few days of walking around together after school, Clint invited Bruce to his house. His room was nothing like Bruce had imagined. Bruce had in mind that he lived in a crypt or a coffin, a dungeon or a cave, something spare and black and dark. It wasn't that at all. It was more like a normal guy's room his age. There was stuff everywhere. There were piles of books, biographies on Ambrose Bierce and Houdini, art books of the works of Jackson Pollock and Ray Johnson, fiction by Kate Chopin, David Hartwell, Robert Bloch and a ragged copy of Grey's Anatomy set off by itself. There were books of poetry – Shelley, Hart Crane, Frank O'Hara, Frank Stanford, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Sylvia Plath – and a stack of nonfiction Bruce didn't even comprehend, titles like The Psychology or a Rumor, Alan Turning: The Enigma, Secret Signals, and stuff by Albert Camus. Bruce had seen some of these books before, in his brother's room after he'd started college. "What kind of grades do you get?" Bruce blurted out. Clint laughed. "Straight D's." At least Bruce had that on him. Bruce had been on the honor roll every semester so far.

Bruce also noticed a paperback copy of the Munroe he had grabbed when they first talked in the library. It was on his bed, open with the front and back of the book exposed. "Why did you bother to take that out of the library?" Bruce said.

He looked at the book and blushed slightly. "I can't keep any of this stuff straight. I need to get better organized. Do you want to start on that for me?"

Bruce looked around and saw that it was a hopeless case.

There were discs everywhere, and even vinyl records. Music by Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, Gram Parsons, Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline, Bix Beiderbecke, Chet Baker, Robert Johnson, Mozart. (Bruce didn't know if these were the exact objects on that first visit, but they were definitely things strewn around his room during the time they spent together.) There must have been twenty or thirty discs poorly stacked on the floor, and more than fifty records spread around like a dropped deck of cards. About the only thing Bruce recognized was a Nirvana disc, everything else was obscure to him, country and jazz and classical. There were posters and postcards covering the walls, mostly of people Bruce had never heard of, like Isadora Duncan and Robert Schumann and a scarred, engaging, mysterious man named Louis Kahn, or people Bruce had heard of but never knew what they looked like, like Anne Sexton and Amelia Earhart, but whoever they were, they were everywhere, their dead faces plastered on the walls and their eyes calmly watching Bruce. Houdini was bound in chains in a large picture above Clint's computer, Natalie Wood smiled from the closet door, and James Dean stood on a frozen farm pond above the bed, looking at his reflection in the ice.

"Do you have anything from our lifetime?" Bruce asked. Clint pushed the door to his room closed to reveal some long haired guy with a beard staring sternly at Bruce from the back of the door. He looked like Charles Manson, but it said "Dennis Wilson" above his head and "Pacific Ocean Blue" just under that. "Why do you have this here?" Bruce said.

"It's some old poster of my Dad's. I like it – he's cute," he replied. Everything was old. He liked old things. He didn't believe in reincarnation or anything like that, but sometimes he felt that he might have been born in the wrong time. He didn't feel much connection with the world, he felt connected only to things in the past. That's what he told Bruce, but later.

His bed was a girl's bed, with a flowery comforter and an old stuffed bear on the pillow. "It was my Mother's," he said. "Hold him, he's soft."

Bruce was at a loss for words, so he just held on to the bear and looked around again. There was another book on his bed, Arshile Gorky: Paintings and Drawings. Bruce put the bear back on the bed and looked at the book. Stuck into the pages was a large folder, and Bruce opened the book to it. The painting reproduced on the left hand page was a number of black patches connected with black lines on a gray background.

Clint quickly took the book from Bruce. "It's a painting about losing his earlier paintings and books in a fire," he said, and put the book back on the bed.

"Gorky. It's a funny name."

"It's not his real name," he said. "He just invented it."

"He's not alive I bet."

"Dead."

Bruce knelt on the floor and looked at the scattered albums. "Did you buy all these?"

"My Father used to work in a record store in college. He must have a thousand albums."

Clint seemed to enjoy Bruce's exploration of his room, sifting through the artifacts he had carelessly assembled.

They heard the front door open. "That's going to be my Mom," he said. "There's something I have to tell you about her. She doesn't have any hair." A second later his Mother appeared in the doorway.

Clint was right, she didn't have any hair, but Bruce had thought he meant she was bald. She didn't have any hair. She didn't have eyebrows or eyelashes or whiskers, nothing. She was as smooth as an egg, and shaped like one as well. She was a small woman, no more than five and a half feet. She looked meek, with her small black expensive-looking eyeglasses. But her appearance was deceptive. Her large, fleshy hand extended toward Bruce as they were introduced, and when Bruce shook it he could tell she was strong. She squeezed Bruce's hand hard and kept exerting more pressure. It was one of those Motherly gestures, Bruce guessed, like telling him not to mess with his son. Bruce tried to give her the best "You can trust me" or "Don't worry" shake back, but Bruce was sure she interpreted it as "We'd be in bed right now if you hadn't come home." She gave Bruce a stern look with those bald eyes, distorted slightly by the lenses of her glasses. Bruce got the message: She could hurt him. Clint later told Bruce that she worked out every day. She didn't lift weights, but ran and jumped rope and boxed. She was younger than Bruce's Mother by about ten years, but she was maybe in the best shape of her life and getting stronger, while Bruce's own mother was riding around in her golf cart and softening into a marshmallow.

She talked for a few minutes and then left the room, saying, "Please keep this door open, Clinton, at least while you have guests." The door swung open and the hairy Dennis Wilson disappeared.

Mrs. Barton was a loan officer at the bank. "She used to be a repo man," Clint told Bruce. "So don't mess with her or me." He said that she had once gone to repossess a car and had just started it and was ready to drive off, when the owner flung open the door and grabbed the steering wheel. Mrs. Barton grabbed the guy's wrist and told him to let go of the wheel. He didn't, and Mrs. Barton began to squeeze. "My Mother broke his wrist and pulled his arm out of the socket," he said.

"She told you this?"

"I found out about it," he said. "Just a word to the wise – be nice to me." He reclined on the bed. Bruce walked over to him, but remained standing.

And old bible rested on the nightstand next to his bed; it might have been the last thing Bruce expected to find in his room. Bruce picked it up and marveled at it. "You read this?" Bruce said.

"Look around you, I read everything," he said. "Don't read too much into it."

Bruce opened the bible to Ecclesiastes, where a bookmark was placed. One passage was underlined: "And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly; I perceived that this also is vexation of the spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief; and he increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."

Clint watched Bruce read the passage and then took the book from him and tossed it on the bed. "It's an old copy," he said. "I didn't do that."

Clint told Bruce that he was an only child just like him. Okay, that last part isn't true, technically. Bruce has an older brother and a sister, but they are ten and twelve years older than he is, respectively, and they have been gone for most of his life, so he's basically an only child. Both of them left home when they turned eighteen, and his sister hasn't been back at all. Bruce's brother Kurt went to Princeton and would come home for the holidays, but now he's married and has three adoptive kids and lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and they hardly ever see each other. "Why would anyone want to go someplace like Baton Rouge?" Bruce's father said the few times his mother asked him if he wanted to go. She's gone a couple of times, but the last time she tried to go, her flight was canceled and she didn't know what to do, so she just sat in the airport. After Bruce's brother called to see which flight she had taken, Bruce's father drove out to the airport to pick her up. She hasn't expressed any desire to go to Baton Rouge again.

Bruce's Sister Wanda left for California the week after she graduated from high school, and Bruce and his family haven't heard from her since. She had a lot in common with Bruce's Dad; she also liked to retreat to remote places, and now she has virtually disappeared.

There was also a daughter between Bruce's brother and him, seven years older than Bruce, but she died. She lived to be nine weeks old. Her name was Barbara and she's buried in the cemetery south of town. Bruce's brother told him they used to go out there twice a year – the whole family – but Bruce had only been there once and that was a long time ago. Bruce wondered what his parents were like before.

Once, when Bruce was younger, he accidentally broke something of his Brother's, a model plane or something, and he started screaming at Bruce that he would have never been born if Barbara was still around. Bruce didn't know if that was true, but try getting the idea out of your head. Sometimes Bruce wished that she had lived and that he wasn't around.


	9. parents, idiots, and incompetents

Bruce's father is an accountant. He's a numbers guy, not a people person. That's an understatement. Bruce imagines he inhabits his spreadsheets as if they are other countries, places where he is the silent master of his silent subjects. Maybe that's why he likes numbers – they can be tamed, domesticated, they are pliable, dutiful, and quiet.

Bruce's father started his business with his best friend right after college, and they make a nice, comfortable living in the small town. They are no longer friends, but they still work together. Bruce's father is a quiet, solitary person anyway. If he's home, he's in his den. It's a small room at the back of the house on the first floor. It's just off the dining room, so he can get up from the table and retreat immediately into his dark, wood-paneled cave. In fact, he always sits at the table with his legs out to the side, ready to bolt to the den. Bruce has only been in there a couple of times. Entry is by invitation only, and Bruce's father rarely invites anyone.

A bookcase covers on entire wall, filled mostly with books on golf, pictures of golf, and a few trophies his father has earned. He still plays, but he's starting to lose interest even in that. Bruce is sure it's because he has to play with other people; if he could be the only person on the course, Bruce is sure he'd play all the time. His world is slowly being reduced to an office and his den, and no one thinks that this is odd.

Bruce's father went to brown university. He played football there, and he now has the appearance of a former lineman who has gone soft. He has a paunch, a sagging gut that hangs over his belt, dragging his whole body with it. His body looks slack and fleshy, although he isn't a fat man; he just sags, in either contentment or resignation.

You might think that Bruce and his Dad, because of their respective football experiences, might have provided some sort of father-son bonding, but they did not. He came to a game or two of Bruce's, but offered no comment afterward. He didn't offer any advice either, take Bruce into the yard and give him any pointers or practice. He didn't even tell Bruce any anecdotes about his own days on the field. Bruce had no idea if he was a good player or terrible. Bruce had seen photographs of him in his uniform, looking large and trim, peering out of his mask, staring steadily into the camera, but there's no story to go with these images. He didn't even show Bruce the pictures; his mother did. He remains as silent in life as in the photographs, and Bruce's mother is horrible at remembering the details of their college days anyway. Even when Bruce broke his finger had little to say, no words of encouragement or sadness, only a matter-of-fact comment. "Football's a tough sport."

"No Shit, Dad." Bruce thought.

Bruce's Mother was a professional incompetent. Bruce's father one day came up with the idea that she should work, that we would live better, more comfortably, if she contributed to the household income. Bruce's mother agreed, with a little resistance. She wanted to get out of the house, and was eager to see if she could make her way in the working world. She soon discovered, however, that she had no talent, no aptitude, no training, and no skills. She attempted numerous jobs, mainly of the clerical, receptionist, office-assistant variety, but was fired from all of them. She couldn't type, couldn't file or work a computer, and was helpless with a phone that had more than one line. She was a detriment and a liability to any company or organization. Her friends joked that she had even been fired as a volunteer at the local library. Bruce didn't know whether this was true, but his mother bright red every time the subject was mentioned.

For a time, Bruce's father was convinced that her employers held her to too high a standard, or didn't take enough time to train her properly, or were bad managers with unclear expectations. Or they were simply idiots. Bruce's mother agreed. Together, they would show those idiots a thing or two about work and how things should be done. So Bruce's father her as his own assistant, or more accurately, as an assistant to his assistant. Of course, by now Bruce's father had forgotten about the initial reason for wanting Bruce's mother to work. He was now paying her, so there was really no extra money coming into the house. It was now a moral issue, family honor, and a matter of worth. "What the hell," he said at dinner when it was all decided. "How horrible can it be?"

It was horrible.

From the few hours of interaction Bruce witnessed on week nights, between the time they got home and the time his father retreated to his den, they fought, argued, bickered, and baited each other, constantly. Mistakes, misunderstandings, miscommunications, and all other unresolved issues of the day would surface surprisingly and suddenly. "What were you thinking?" his father would blurt out, and they would be off, thrashing through a thread of his mother's fuck-ups. She couldn't do anything correctly, it seemed, and often admitted as much, although she defended herself frequently, blaming an assortment of circumstances. Some of it would have been laughable, if their arguments hadn't descended into anger and resentment, and if either of them had a sense of perspective, objectivity, or humor. After Bruce's father had bawled her out for mangling yet another phone message she had handed him, she would yell, "I wrote it exactly as they told me." "They're changing their story." "They're liars."

Bruce's father is a stubborn man, and because of that stubbornness, blind confidence in his abilities as a manager and mentor, or the strength of his desire to see that his wife did not become the laughingstock of the work force, he stuck with her for more than a year. Finally they gave up. Bruce didn't know who raised the white flag first, but one morning his father left for work and his mother stayed at the kitchen table, dressed in her robe and drinking coffee. Her days as a member of the working class had come to an end.

Now she is incompetent and free. She is almost as ineffective as a homeworker, housewife, whatever you call it, as she was in the corporate world. If she has trouble with anything around the house, she is more than likely to leave it for Bruce's father to deal with when he gets home. Once, when she had trouble opening a can of chicken broth, it waited on the kitchen counter for Bruce's father to open when he got home so she could start cooking dinner. This of course meant that dinner wasn't waiting for Bruce's dad when he walked in the doorway, which meant that his disappearing act into the den was also delayed. This was fine when Bruce's mother was working, but unacceptable when she is home all day. He was not happy. "Solve the problem," he screamed. "Solve the problem by yourself." Bruce didn't know how many cans of soup the neighbors opened after that, but dinner was always ready on time.

The greatest, most obvious, talent Bruce's mother displays is her ability to straighten. She has a vision in her head of how she wants the cloth napkins and placemats arranged on the dining room table, and she spends time over days, weeks even, adjusting them until they are in proper alignment. She labors over the drapes, forcing the pleats and folds of the fabric to align her will. Before Bruce had his own phone, Bruce would sometimes use the one near the bed in his parent's room and his mother would yell at him because he had disrupted the comforter or pillows, or who knows what else. They were running late one time and she stopped on her way out of the house to adjust the coats hanging on the wall pegs near the back door, and Bruce joked that if his head were cracked open and he needed to get to the hospital, she would still stop to straighten things before they left. She didn't think that was funny.

Bruce always tried to avoid going home immediately after school, because there would always be something for him to do, something to straighten or something to be yelled at for having unstraightened, or some problem or mishap to solve for his mother. She is a woman who needs someone to take care of her, but it isn't going to be Bruce.

Bruce shouldn't give the impression that his mother is utterly useless. She cleans around the house (although his father complains that she smears everything: she smears the windows, she smears the countertops, she smears the furniture), and more often than not she has breakfast ready by seven-thirty so his father can eat and get out of the house, and dinner ready at six thirty-five, a few minutes after he has entered the house from another day of not talking to his business partner, so he can quickly sit down at the table and not talk to his marriage partner or son. Some nights all you hear is the sound of their forks scraping against the plates, with Bruce's father leading the pace as he shovels food into his mouth. Bruce's mother eats at an alarmingly slow pace, counterbalancing his father's inhalation. You see the fork move toward her mouth, carrying food, but her plate never seems to empty. She is left by herself every night, alone at the table, slowly finishing her meal. The only times Bruce's father stayed until the end of her eating were the holidays, and that was long enough to last the whole year.

Bruce's mother isn't a terrible cook, although Bruce remembers his father sitting over a burned breakfast muttering, "How can you screw up scrambled eggs?" She had a distinct propensity to make chicken breasts with cream-of-mushroom soup poured on top more than Bruce and his father would have preferred, or more than anyone would prefer, he'd imagine. It had to be the world's easiest dish: you put the chicken in a casserole dish, pour the soup on, directly from the can, and then make some rice and a salad, and there's dinner. She also claimed to make an "exotic" dish, tuna curry. While the meal contained both tuna and curry, it wasn't in any way exotic, unless your idea of exotic is a can of tuna, a can of cream-of-mushroom soup (a family staple), a spoonful of curry powder, and some instant rice. It tasted about as good as it sounds. Bruce's father ate oyster crackers at every meal. He kept a plastic container filled with them, which he would bring out from his den and set on one side of his plate. He would shove a handful of the little unsalted hexagons into his mouth after every few bites. Sometimes he would emerge from his den with cracker crumbs all over the front of his shirt or sweater, carrying his plastic bucket to the kitchen for a refill.

What Bruce's mother lacked in imagination, she made up for in presentation and arrangement. She served her dishes on platters lined with precisely arranged flowers or other garnish. She had elaborated tableware. When they had grapefruit for breakfast (which was frequently – it's almost impossible to screw that up), a small black box would appear on the table, containing spoons with one serrated edge, designed specifically for removing the sections of halved grapefruit. After breakfast the box would disappear, and the next morning, if they were to have grapefruit again, it would return on the table, the spoons lined up in their case, ready and precise.

Bruce's mother is a big fan of precision, and tries her best to maintain it. Unfortunately, her own incompetence gets in the way. Dinner is served, except when a can won't open. That's the way she is: fine unless something goes wrong and that minor obstacle becomes a huge wall she can't scale. She becomes helpless whenever things don't go smoothly, or exactly as she imagined them.


	10. school

Clint and Bruce had two class's together, history and math. They never sat together. Mrs. Storm had assigned seats in math, but you could sit anywhere you wanted in history. Clint always sat up front, his chair pulled away from the rest of the class. He frequently slept in class, or at least he appeared to be asleep. He would put his head down on his desk and close his eyes, yet nothing was ever lost on him. He seemed to know more about what was going on better than anyone else in the class did. If he was ever called on, he would answer the question without lifting his head or opening his eyes. Once in history class, Mr. Maximoff became so frustrated by his "attitude" that he demanded Clint sit up and "pay attention". Clint sat up and began reciting Mr. Maximoff's lesson on Martin Luther King Jr., word for word from the beginning, providing an impressive demonstration that he'd been paying attention all along. He went on for a good ten minutes before Mr. Maximoff dismissed him with a wave of his hand and his blonde head slowly descended into the black sleeve of his sweater. It said all the Goths could do the same trick, but Bruce didn't believe it.

Clint and Bruce spoke before and after school, and almost never once classes began, but they were in constant contact. Clint would leave notes and postcards in Bruce's locker, or send them along with one of his friends. Bruce would open a text book and there'd be a note from Clint, folded neatly and placed at the days lesson. Bruce suspected that Clint knew a number of magic tricks could pick locks and get into his locker and leave things there without Bruce's knowledge. They weren't your usual notes. Clint would relate conversations he had overheard, interesting facts from class, stories from the newspaper, even other people's notes. "Found this near my locker this morning: 'I hate you. I never want to see you again. You said it wasn't true but I saw your car outside her house. You lie, and I can't take it anymore. I hate you. P.S. Call me later.'"

Bruce was unprepared for Clint's outpouring of energy and enthusiasm and attention, at first it overwhelmed Bruce. Bruce thought that he would never be able to keep up with Clint, that Clint would be bored with him. Instead things became easier. Clint's energy was contagious and Bruce wanted more of his attention. They talked on the phone, but Clint preferred to send text messages or, better yet, IM or e-mail, where he could reference websites and send Bruce along a trail of other information. Clint was constantly changing his name on Bruce's buddy list, using people's initials and making Bruce figure out who they were: C.A.B. (Clint Alexander Barton), E.A.P. (Edgar Allen Poe) , J.T.R. (Jack the Ripper), E.M.H. (Ernest Miller Hemingway), A.A.F. (Abigail Anne Folger), G.A.H. (Gary Allen Hinman), E.W.H. (?).

After maybe five or six weeks, Clint stopped putting postcards in Bruce's locker and started sending them to him through the mail, along with letters and large envelopes filled with things he had found interesting, magazine and newspaper articles, or even random objects like a key ("I found this near your house. What do you think it opens?"), photographs ("Who are these people?) And letters or notes he had found on the street or left behind in classrooms. It was a constant stream of stuff, and Bruce didn't know if he wanted him to send him things in return. Much of what he sent Bruce he puzzled over for a while and then discarded (the key, for instance, looked as if it went with luggage or a briefcase, and Bruce wasn't going to sneak into every house in the neighborhood to find out which). Bruce could identify with some of the people in the photos, and Clint seemed pleased with what Bruce could tell him. Clint didn't really seem to care whether Bruce had a response to what he sent or not – Clint's enjoyment appeared to come from sharing the item with Bruce and sparking some train of thought. Bruce never sent him anything; Bruce stuck to the phone or the computer, but even then there was no way to keep up with all the things Clint sent him. Everything seemed to interest Clint, and it made Bruce interested as well. Sometimes Clint's interests uncovered things that were secretive and personal. Clint sent Bruce a handwritten note he had found: "I need help with Tony," and in his handwriting asked, "What does this mean?"


	11. tony

Bruce's friend Tony Stark was a drug dealer. "I don't care," Clint said when Bruce told him, and then laughed. "It's always the popular ones you have to watch out for. Tony wasn't like a superstore, big-box pharmacy dealer, though. You couldn't buy whatever you wanted; he had a limited inventory. He sold whatever drugs he could easily get his hands on, which meant that he sold his little brother's Ritalin, and he sold his sisters Prozac, and his mother's Prozac too. He would sneak into their rooms and swipe a few pills and then sell them around the school. It was an easy way for him to make money, and he started going to the junior high school and buying drugs off kids, mostly Ritalin, and then selling them to upperclassmen. He would buy the drugs for no more than a dollar a pill and sell them from anywhere between two and five dollars. He didn't sell drugs to anyone younger than a sophomore, but he had no qualms about paying nothing to the younger kids. Bruce once mentioned that he was ripping off kids who didn't know the value of what they were selling, and Tony lectured Bruce. "Value is relative," he said. "A quarter is a lot of money to some people, a quarter of a million is not to some other people." Tony is the only person Bruce knew who talked about things like "supply chain," and "distribution models," and concepts like "lifetime value of a customer." Bruce had no idea where Tony got this stuff – maybe he was born with it.

He made good money, but he never got greedy. He knew he had to be careful. There were too many ways to get caught. He could get caught by his family for stealing their drugs, he could get caught by the teachers or principal for selling the drugs, and he could get caught with more supply than demanded, but that was hardly likely. There were too many kids who wanted drugs, even in their small school. Bruce had asked him once if it was true that the Goths used drugs. "They've never bought anything from me," he said, but you couldn't take Tony at his word about that stuff. Tony was like a doctor protecting his patients' confidentiality. Everyone seemed to know (or suspect) that if you needed something, you went to Tony, yet no one seemed to know who ever actually went.

He had one prime attribute going for him: Everyone liked him. Tony was the most popular person in the school's sophomore class; he might have been the most popular person in the whole school. He treated everyone with respect and appeared to genuinely like people. And all the teachers liked him, all his customers liked him, all his suppliers liked him. "It's a service industry," he said. "It's just good business. Where would I be without my suppliers and where would I be without my customers?" he's the only person Bruce knew who talked about a moral code. "The ten commandments are okay," he told Bruce, "but Dale Carnegie's better."

Tony would usually be seen wearing a worn-out blue blazer, every pocket stuffed with scraps of paper. They were reminders of who owed him how much and when it was owed, or whom he had to meet to collect from or transact with. Everything was written in a cryptic code he had invented, some obscure shorthand that he could decipher in a second, but that no one else would understand. Each pocket even meant something; it was a whole system. "I'm on top of it," Tony said. He certainly was. He carried The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, the financial times, and the Economist around in his backpack. He kept notebooks, detailed logs of all his transactions. He would transfer the notes on the scraps of paper into his notebooks, which were filled with a different code. Bruce sometimes wondered whether that's why he and Clint got along – they each kept their own set of strange notebooks, tracking the town in their own ways, chronicling their lives from two different points of view.

Tony's notebooks never left his room. He locked them in a gray two-drawer file cabinet beside his desk, and unlocked the file cabinet and removed the ledgers only to record the scraps into his notebooks' orderly columns. "You've got to keep them balanced," he said. Bruce asked him why he was so sensitive about them, since they were all in code away. "You have to do everything to protect your customers," he told Bruce. "Besides, any code can be broken. It just takes time. It also makes me feel important." Tony was important, by the look of the number of notebooks he kept locked up. He showed Bruce one once. Of course it made no sense to Bruce, but Tony pointed to the column where he tracked the money he had collected. "A perfect record," he said. "I've never lost a penny." It could have been true, knowing Tony. He had a way with people. His notebooks aligned perfectly with the world. He was in control; the columns confirmed it. People asked, Tony gave. Tony offered, people accepted, on his terms. Everything was an agreement.

Tony's other constant was a blue Notre Dame visor, with the interlocking ND removed, so you could see only the darker blue shadow where the logo had been. He had bent the bill of the cap, but then blunted the left side (his left) so that it pointed skyward. "I have to have it trending up," he explained. His father wanted him to go to Notre Dame. "He's going to be disappointed," Tony said. "But that's all right, he's used to that." When he first said this, Bruce thought that Tony was referring to other disappointments, not related to him, but now Bruce is not so sure.

Tony was practically the only friend Bruce had, and they'd been friend's almost first birth. He used to live a few blocks away and his mother looked after Bruce during the time his mother was working. They moved to a different house, a mile outside town, but the two still see each other at school and hang out whenever Tony's not taking care of business. Sometimes Bruce thinks that Tony is his only friend because they've been friends for so long, that if they met for the first time tomorrow, Tony would never want to be his friend.

Bruce was worried about telling Tony about Clint and him, especially because of his reaction the first day they saw Clint. Bruce told him about a week after the football game. By then Tony had already knew. "Good for you," he said. "You're definitely one of the more interesting couples in school. Just don't let me catch you wearing makeup." Tony knew Bruce better than that.

When Tony and Bruce were younger, Bruce's mother used to pick Tony and him up after school, but that stopped when Bruce was in the fourth grade. "You can walk home," she said. "It'll be good for you." Tony's mom picked them up sometimes, but that couldn't be relied on when she started having trouble at home, and then stopped altogether after they moved. Tony had business to take care of now anyway. Bruce didn't know what his mother had to take care of during the day. She talked on the phone with her friends, maybe, or ran over to Hilliker, about ten minutes away. She used to hang out with Mrs. Stark during the day, and frequently she would do things with Mr. and Mrs. Stark (Bruce's father rarely joined them, preferring the sanctuary of his den), but they stopped being friends. Bruce thought it was Mr. Stark's fault. He was a drunk that was the start of it. Tony's Father wasn't one of those guys you had to go and drag out of the bar or anything like that. He would drink by himself. He would drive his car to the liquor store in Hilliker or Shale and then find some back road and park his car and drink until all the bottles were dry.

He sold cars in Hilliker, and his wife first suspected something when there was a noticeable decrease in his monthly paychecks. He wasn't making the commissions he used to. She would call the dealership and he wouldn't be around. Then he would come home late, smelling like alcohol. She told him that it was a problem. He said he would quit. He didn't.

He missed more and more work and finally was fired. Still he didn't quit drinking. Finally Mrs. Stark asked Bruce's mother to help. She must have been desperate. Bruce's mother took the initiative for once and called a bunch of his friends and family together, and a few of Mrs. Stark's friends too, and they held an intervention. They all told him that he had a problem and that he needed to get it taken care of for his family's sake. A couple of days later he went down to Joplin and spent three weeks in rehab.

It was when he got back that Mrs. Stark stopped wanting anything to do with Bruce's mother. She stopped seeing a lot of her friends, as if they had been the cause of all the trouble. Or maybe she was embarrassed. Then the Stark's moved north of town. It was only a few miles away, but it might as well been the North Pole. Tony and Bruce still hung out, but their parents never socialized anymore. You never saw Tony's mom.

Everyone saw Mr. Stark, though. After he got out of rehab, he spent his days down at Odinson's gas station. Odinson's was a full-serve gas station; you had to go to the other end of town, to Murdock's, for self-serve, and the gas was usually the same price. You would see him anytime you went by, sitting in a black plastic chair by the front counter, sipping a big cup of coffee. Every once in a while he might get up and clean someone's windows, but he never pumped gas. He wasn't working. Thor Odinson or his little brother, Loki, did the work. Tony's dad just sat and sipped.

Tony's mother waited before she said anything to her husband about going back to work. She gave him time to adjust to his sobriety. But Tony thought differently. "Why doesn't he just sit on the road with a sign on his neck that says, 'I'm a drunken out-of-work bum'?"

Tony's father sat at the gas station for a long time. It was the only place Bruce saw him anymore. One day after school, in the middle of October, Bruce guessed, Clint and he were walking down along the river and Tony came out of the woods, holding his hand over his right eye. Bruce was a little embarrassed to see him, since Bruce had been ignoring him since he started hanging out with Clint. It was nothing personal, it was just all Clint, all the time.

"Are you all right?" Clint asked him.

"I will be." Tony took his hand away and revealed a swollen mess.

"That's going to look good in the morning," Bruce said.

"What happened?" Clint said.

Tony looked at Clint with his left eye and then at Bruce. He didn't want to say. "Costumer dissatisfaction."

"Do you want to go after that guy?" Bruce asked.

"No, I'll take care of it later." Tony looked at Bruce's hand. Bruce would have gone after the guy, even with his splint. Bruce was about to say so, when Clint spoke.

"Put a raw potato on it. It's the best thing."

"How do you know that?" Bruce said.

"It's an old witch's trick," he said. "I can also put a curse on the person who did it."

"That you can do," Tony said.

Bruce invited them both over to his house. Tony didn't want to go on his own. And he didn't want to be seen around town with a swollen eye. That would be bad for business. So they walked to Bruce's house.

They went in through the garage and into the kitchen, which was a mistake. They should have gone through the front door – that way they would have avoided Bruce's mother. Bruce should've known better; he spent every afternoon avoiding her, and here he led Tony right in on her. When they walked into the kitchen, Bruce's mother and Tony's dad were sitting at the table, drinking coffee.

"Clint and Tony are going to hang out for a while," Bruce said. Bruce's mother was startled. She got up from the table but then sat down again. "Okay," she said. Tony's father didn't say anything. Tony didn't say anything. Then, without looking up, Mr. Stark said, "Tell him to get out of here before I blacken the other one." He hadn't even moved his head; he spoke directly at the coffee. Bruce's mother looked at Mr. Stark. They quickly went upstairs to Bruce's room.

"What do you think all that was about?" Tony said.

They didn't say anything about his eye. Bruce didn't see how Mr. Stark could have beaten his son and then made it over to his house. Bruce wasn't going to bring it up unless Tony did.

"What do you suppose he's doing here?" Tony said.

"Maybe he's helping my mom out," Bruce said. "She's always getting somebody to do work for her."

"Maybe they finally kicked him out of the gas station," Clint said.

"Maybe she's trying to help him," Bruce said.

"Maybe they're having an affair," Tony said.

Tony's dad was at the same table, drinking coffee, a few nights after that. It got so that Clint and Bruce wanted to see if he was there, but they didn't want to go at the same time, it made them uncomfortable. Tony always asked if they had seen him. "You'd think that if something was going on they wouldn't just hang around drinking coffee after," Clint said. "You'd think she'd get him the hell out before anyone saw him."

"But maybe since we saw him that first time, they figured what the hell," Bruce said.

"It's strange," Tony said.

It got stranger.

One night Bruce came back later than usual from Clint's after school. Bruce was later for dinner, which is usually a crime in his house, but that night no one said anything about it. Bruce walked in the door and there were his parents, sitting at the ends of the table was usual, and there was Tony's father, sitting at the table with them, at Bruce's spot. He was even eating off Bruce's plate. Bruce didn't know what to do, so he stood there in the kitchen with his coat on, looking at his place on the table.

"Where have you been?" his mother asked in an almost friendly tone.

"Over at Clint's. I lost track of time. I'm sorry."

"Well get a plate and get some dinner while it's still warm," she told him.

Nothing more was said. Bruce sat at the table across from Tony's dad.

After dinner Bruce went up to his room and called Tony.

"What happened at your house?" Bruce asked.

"Nothing," Tony said.

"Your mom didn't say anything?"

"No."

"Well, guess what happened over here."

"I don't know."

"Your father ate over here. And my dad was here too."

"You're not serious."

"The three of them were sitting there as normal as can be."

"Your Dad didn't do anything?"

"None of them did anything. We all ate dinner and then I came up here and called you. I think your Dad left a few minutes ago." Tony said that he would call Bruce if anything happened at his house, but he didn't call.

Tony's father sat at Bruce's place at the table for the next five or six nights, and then it was over, without a word or a warning. This episode had ended, and no one said anything about his being in Bruce's house.


	12. his heart, previously

Clint Barton wasn't Bruce's first relationship; he had dated Betty Ross in the spring of the same year. There was nothing wrong with Betty Ross. She was smart and nice and pretty, tall and thin, with straight black hair. She wore glasses sometimes, and she was quiet. Near the end of March her younger brother, Peter, had told Tony that she liked Bruce, so Bruce called her up one night and asked her if she wanted to go see a movie or something. She did. On the Friday of that week, her Father drove them to Hilliker, where the nearest theater was, dropped them off, then picked them up when the movie was over. She said barely a word the whole time.

"I don't think she likes me," Bruce told Tony on the Monday.

"That's not what her brother says."

"Even after Friday?"

"He says she had a good time."

"Maybe he's just jerking me around."

"It's true," Tony said. "Everyone's out to get you."

Bruce found Peter after school. "Tony says that your sister still likes me."

"Why shouldn't she?"

"I'm not so sure things went all that well," Bruce said.

"She's just shy. You didn't tell her that I talked to Tony, did you?"

"No."

"I mean talked to him at all."

"No," Bruce said.

"All right. Give Betty another call. If you want to, I mean."

Bruce didn't know whether Peter talked to his sister or not, but she was a lot different the second time they went out. She even spoke. They started going out after that, hanging out after school and on the weekends. She would call him every night, and it was all right at first. Then Bruce got bored, he guessed. He didn't really like spending time with her anymore, no matter how much they kissed. Bruce didn't feel a connection with her; nothing drew him toward her. Something about her made Bruce want to be away from her whenever they were together. Bruce takes that back – there wasn't anything wrong with Betty Ross. There was something about him that made him want to be away from her. They would sit at his house and watch TV, and the time would barely move forward to when she would leave. Bruce didn't know what to say around her, and the fact that she was quiet made him uncomfortable or uninterested, or both. It was easier to be alone, he thought. At that time Bruce wanted to be alone, he guessed. And then he was. More than he wanted.

Bruce hardly knew how to get into a relationship, and he had no idea how to get out of one. Bruce wanted to break up with Betty, but he didn't know what to say or do. Everything dragged on for a few more months, and then when freshmen spring dance was coming up, Tony and Bruce devised a plan.

Betty and Bruce were supposed to go to the dance together, of course, but Bruce called her on the night of the dance and told her that he was sick and couldn't make it. She said that she wasn't going to go either then, but Bruce persuaded her to go. She could hang out with her friends and have a good time without him. She had to go to the dance. That was critical. Because when Tony saw her sitting at a table by herself he went over to her and said "I'm sorry you guys broke up," then acted all surprised when she acted surprised. "I didn't know he was sick," Tony then lied. "He told me he was going to break up with you before the dance so I figured…"

Betty immediately went home and called Bruce. "Tony said that you were going to break up with me before the dance tonight."

"I'm sorry about that Betty. I was going to, but then I got sick and I didn't want to do it over the phone." To tell the truth, that's exactly how Bruce wanted to do it. Tony had no problem breaking up for him. In fact, he enjoyed it. It was simply another transaction for him. Bruce was a coward, he'd admit that. And he'd like to say that he felt bad, but the next day Tony and he were laughing about it.

"You should have seen her face," he said. "It was like I'd hit her in the head with a shovel. How often do you get to do that?"

Betty didn't talk to Bruce again for a long time. She went around and people some shit about Bruce, and a few more people in the world stopped talking to him. Bruce didn't have that many friends to begin with, and now Betty was subtracting a few more. She left notes in Bruce's locker telling him how terrible he was and how much she hated him. Bruce ignored them. He didn't know why he was all in a hurry to get away from her; it wasn't like Bruce was suddenly doing something more exciting after they broke up. Bruce would wander around town by himself, try to avoid going home to his mother, and watch Tony conduct his business. Bruce couldn't go with him – that was bad for business, he said – so Bruce would follow him around, spying from a safe distance. That's what Bruce did now that he wasn't with Betty – he spied on his best friend. It was always interesting to see who was buying from Tony. It wasn't just the burnouts and the jocks, there were people who everybody thought were squeaky clean, good looking students. There were preachers' kids and teachers' kids, even adults, who would meet Tony behind some building or at some out-of-the-way spot, and he would hand them a small bag of something and take their money. When Bruce got bored of watching Tony, he would pretend to run into him and then walk around him for a while. He was good, though he never talked about business, he was business.

Betty and Bruce had a few classes together and they would pass each other In the halls almost every day at school, but she stopped talking to him. They ignored each other to the point that Bruce had almost forgotten about her. But when Clint and Bruce found those notes in their lockers after the football game, Bruce was certain that it was Betty who had left them.


End file.
